"The bad news is that if you are at all like me, you'll probably read over what you have written and spend the rest of the day obsessing and praying that you do not die before you completely rewrite or destroy what you have written. Lest the eagerly awaiting world learn how bad your first drafts are. The obsessing may keep you awake. Or the self-loathing may force you to fall into a narcoleptic coma before dinner. But let's just say that you do fall asleep at a normal hour. Then the odds are that you will wake up at 4 in the morning having dreamed you died. You may experience a jittery form of existential dread, considering the absolute meaninglessness of life and the fact that no one has ever really loved you. You may find yourself consumed with a free floating shame and a hopelessness about your work and the realization that you will have to throw out everything you've done so far and start from scratch. And then the miracle happens. The sun comes up again. So you get up and do your morning things and one thing leads to another. And eventually you find yourself back at the desk staring blankly at the pages you filled yesterday. And there on page four is a paragraph with all sorts of life in it. Smells, and sounds and voices and colors and even a moment of dialogue that makes you say to yourself very, very softly: "hmmm". You will throw out the first three pages. Pages you needed to write to get to that fourth page. To get back to that one long paragraph that was what you had in mind when you started. Only you didn't know that. Couldn't know that until you got to it. And the story begins to materialize. And when you do find out what one corner of your vision is, you're off and running.
I wish I felt that kind of inspiration more often. I almost never do. All I know is that if I sit there long enough something will happen."
~ Anne Lamott, Bird By Bird
The last few weeks of my life have been a... (awesome? awful?) wonderous exercise in getting knocked down 7 times and rising up 8. The condensing, distilling vortex of StartupBus followed by that unique mass distortion effect of SXSW. And then, as if the word enough itself had gone horribly out of fashion, staying on in Austin to start Hacker Embassy... well it's all been a big neverending much.
I've been a bit ravenous, searching after any shred of practice or perspective which could give me some advantage in learning to ride these new, sometimes thrilling, often overwhelming waves.
Today, out of the primordial mess of subconscious interconnections collected through walking takahi over the abstract and literal landscapes I've travelled, a more concise thought yelled whispering to me:
The human body has space only in its brain fueled attention for one viscerally negative focus at a time. If you find yourself blocked by that negating chain of thoughts, choose a new way to fail.
Wouldn't you know it? My ego-depleted writer's block began to evaporate instantly.
## I’m trying something new below. Inspired by the Curator’s Code, I’ll be citing sources of a wide variety that contributed somehow to what I’m writing about. This one is a pretty long list:
• Aaron Swartz, Believe You Can Change
• Steve Jobs, Commencement Speech
